Byrne Dairy Will Start Yogurt Production

Byrne Dairy is looking to expand and get involved in the yogurt business.

We head north now to Cortlandville, where Byrne Dairy is looking to expand and get involved in the yogurt business. NewsChannel 34's Jeff Kulikowsky has the story.

Byrne is 80 years into the dairy business.....but brand new to the yogurt sector. Even though it's jumping into a fast growing and increasingly crowded field, they say there's plenty of room for them, especially the way yogurt consumption is becoming a breakfast, lunch and dinner staple.

Byrne Hollow Site Director, Mary Camm says, "Different types of bacteria give the yogurt a different flavor, different texture and we ran a lot of trials in our pilot plant to come up with the flavor our sales and marketing team thought would be universally appealing to our customers."

The company will be making conventional and greek varieties. It's own label, Byrne Hollow, should be hitting shelves soon. They also will be making yogurt for at least four or five other companies for starters, like Dannon. Today, they were making a yogurt cereal bowl for Kellogg's.

Carl Byrne, President, Byrne Dairy, says, "We had to travel to four or five European countries to look at a lot of different yogurt plants, cheese plants, how they were put together, the type of people needed to work in the plants, operate the plants."

This is the UltraClean filler and the unique thing about it, it makes the yogurt stay fresh twice as long as it normally would. Everything in this room is about clean, hence my attire here, they don't want any other bacteria introduced into the yogurt than what they want, including with the air which is specially filtered just for this room.

Mary Camm says, "It's an amazing piece of technology that I think is a breakthrough for the yogurt industry in terms of its ability to protect the yogurt and give the customer what they want whether they eat it on the first day its made or the last day of its code."

Byrne says the plant is built to give public access, tours and viewing, which you'll be able to do from these windows above the plant floor...adding to what you can find on a nutrition label in the store.

Carl Byrne says, "People would also like to see how their products are being made and who's making them, the fact that this is local and this is a great area for dairy, it's a foodie area."

The overall plan is to add cheese making, and even an ampitheater one day, making it a dairy campus not just a factory.

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